The Daily - A Culture of Secrecy That Perpetuated Abuse

Episode Date: August 16, 2018

A grand jury report found that Roman Catholic priests had abused more than 1,000 children in Pennsylvania over a period of 70 years. Some church officials say the report reiterates issues that have already been addressed, but details suggest otherwise. Guest: Laurie Goodstein, a national religion correspondent for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.This episode contains descriptions of abuse.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, a grand jury report finds that Catholic priests abused 1,000 children in Pennsylvania over a period of 70 years. The church insists it's old news, but details of the report suggest it's not. It's Thursday, August 16th.

Laurie Goodstein, this feels like the most explosive reporting on the Catholic Church since the Boston Globe's spotlight reporting 16 years ago. Did it come as a surprise to you as a religion reporter? I have to say it didn't. We are now in a new stage of the clergy sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. And things had been kind of revving up even before this Pennsylvania grand jury report was released. Lori Goodstein covers religion for The Times. A lot of Catholics were asking, what did people in the hierarchy know about a particular cardinal? That's Theodore McCarrick, who was the former Archbishop of Washington, D.C.

And he resigned very recently because he had a record of abusing not only children, but also seminarians and young priests. And apparently, warnings about him were made to Catholic officials, to his brother bishops, to Vatican officials in the United States, and likely to the Vatican in Rome as well. And not only was he kept in place over many years, but he was made a cardinal and given a very prominent seat in Washington. And his resignation, McCarrick, told you what about this new stage in the church abuse scandal? Well, it got people looking at systemic cover-up. So now we're in a stage where the people at the very top of the church are themselves accused of being abusers. And you're looking at the people around them and asking, what did they know? When

did they know it? So what exactly is in this report that was handed down by this grand jury in Pennsylvania on Tuesday? Well, partly what you get is some numbers. It looked at six dioceses in Pennsylvania, six out of the eight diocese in Pennsylvania, and found that there were 300 priests that they could identify who were credibly accused of sexually abusing children. 1,000 potential victims that they could identify. But they very quickly said that those numbers are really a shot in the dark, that they're probably an undercount. They say that there are victims who either are too afraid to come forward or whose abuser priests were not showing up in church files. The grand jury relied to a great extent on the church's own files. All bishops keep secret archives. Those were subpoenaed, and the grand jury looked at, they say, half a million pages. And so they were pulling names

and records of priests out of those documents. Now, if there was a priest who didn't show up in a document, who was never known to be an abuser, well, you know, those victims and that priest is not going to be counted in this report. So even that set of astonishing numbers, 1,000 victims, 300 accused priests, they're basically saying, this grand jury, that that's probably a significant understatement. They did say that. And I have to say that these numbers sound like a lot to a lot of people, but they don't to me. We've been looking at numbers like this from other dioceses where we've been able to get a clear picture. And there are very few. I mean, there have been very few of these kinds of reports.

And the reason this one in Pennsylvania was so groundbreaking is it practically looked at an entire state. It's the first time a government entity has investigated what happened in almost an entire state. has investigated what happened in almost an entire state. And now the entire state of Pennsylvania actually has been studied because there were grand juries also in the other two remaining dioceses, Philadelphia and the diocese of Altoona-Johnstown. So it sounds like it's actually pretty rare for an entire state to be studied this way when it comes to the church. It never happened before. This is unprecedented in the United States. What are some of the details of the abuse that struck you in particular in this report from Pennsylvania?

Well, I'm hesitating, I guess, because of the breadth of the depravity. Mm-hmm. I mean, I've been covering this a long time, but when you see a collection of abuse like this, the vulnerability of the victims, I mean, you know, without going into too much explicit detail, there were children abused in hospital rooms. There were three sisters in one family abused, one as young as 18 months old. There were some things that read as though it was torture. Children who were whipped, stripped and whipped. You know, it's just a collection of horrors. And so when you read through this thing, I mean, the grand jurors, as you read the report, you can see how appalled and angry they are.

They are angry about what they learned. What do you mean? And then as a reader, you can't help feeling that way also. How could you actually see their anger in this written report? Well, partly it's in the choice of words. They talk in particular about a playbook for concealing the truth. And then they go through point by point. Well, what does the playbook look like?

And the tone of it is almost sarcastic because they're talking about, well, if you were to follow a playbook, here's what you do as church officials. Number one, use euphemisms. Don't talk about rape or abuse or molestation. Talk about inappropriate contact. Can you hear the sarcasm here? Number two is send only inexperienced people to conduct investigations. So make it look like you're investigating, but then send people who are completely unprepared to actually judge or hear cases of child sexual abuse. Number three is then send the priest to a church-run treatment center. And then, if you do remove a priest, number four,

don't tell parishioners why. You know, say he's on medical leave or, you know, he's had to take another assignment, but don't be honest. And then number five is, continue to provide him housing and pay him a salary.

Even if he has committed child abuse. That's right. Now, number six in the playbook is, if his conduct becomes known, don't remove him from the priesthood. Instead, transfer him to another parish, another location. And then last, they say, above all, don't tell the police. And it seems like everything about this is crafted to prevent these cases and these stories from becoming public or entering the legal system.

That's right. Above all, the thing guiding the bishops is prevent scandal. Scandal could cause people to turn away from the faith. It could cause people to turn away from the faith. It could cause people to turn away from the church. So you don't want that. And so in some ways they're saying, we're protecting our people from this disturbing news. The other thing though that they're doing is they're protecting their priests. They're protecting the church. I mean, the irony here, of course, is that this is the worst thing that has happened to the church, you know, since the Reformation. Historians say this. That's how cataclysmic this is. So they were attempting to protect the church, but it has all backfired. but it has all backfired. So is the greatest crime that this report is unearthing, not necessarily the abuse itself,

as absolutely horrific as it was, but the systematic complicity and the kind of intentional covering up that occurred afterwards inside the church? Well, that is what a lot of abuse survivors have told me over the years. Yes, the abuse was terrible. It was painful. It's given me nightmares.

But the real torture was being turned away by my own church or not being believed. They say that has hurt a whole lot more than the initial abuse. I hear that over and over. It sounds like you talk to a lot of people who were abused by the Catholic Church. I have. And what's amazing is both how similar the stories sound and yet how each time someone tells me something that is so astounding that I can't get over it. And something like that happened reporting this last story too. What was it? this last story, too. What was it? Well, this is a man who did testify before this grand jury, and he was abused as a child for, I think he told me, about three years,

I think starting from the age of 10, by his parish priest. Amazingly, this man became a priest. His name is James Volujac. He told me that in 2010, he finally decided he would go and tell his bishop what happened to him as a child. And he says that the bishop asked him, how many times were you abused, do you think? And James said, about 15. He said the bishop said to him, oh, you were lucky. Wow. And James said, why do you say that? And he said, well, it's usually much more than that.

And then he said that that bishop never investigated, never asked him about it again. He said the bishop did help him with one thing, made sure that he got into some treatment that he said helped him. He said maybe even saved his life. But, you know, reported or prosecuted or turned in the priest? No, you know, that didn't happen.

That really floored me. You were lucky. You were only abused 15 times. So knowing that the Catholic Church has responded in these ways to this abuse for so long, how did the church respond to this particular report from Pennsylvania? I'd say in two almost contradictory ways. On the one hand, they were contrite. Let me say that in the name of the Church of Pittsburgh, hand, they were contrite. Let me say that in the name of the Church of Pittsburgh,

and in my own name, and in the name of my predecessors, we are sorry. I am sorry. Some of the bishops in Pennsylvania were very apologetic, but others were more combative, that this is a report about a church that doesn't exist anymore. We've turned the page. Why don't we get any credit for how things have looked since 2002? And in fact, the Pittsburgh bishop, David Zubik, really gave voice to that. There was no cover-up going on. And I think that it's important to be able to state that we have, over the course of the last 30 years for sure, been transparent about everything that has, in fact, been transpiring. So I think that point needs to be made.

We've been transparent about everything. Now, that's actually contradicted in the report, that they've been transparent about everything. But there is the sense among the current class of bishops that we handled this, we have reformed, and we're not getting any credit for it. Over the last several months, an intense legal battle has played out between my office and individuals who have concealed their identities through sealed court filings. I listened to the Attorney General of Pennsylvania talk about this grand jury report, and what he seemed to be saying was even if the church has reformed, they didn't make this investigation very easy to conduct. These petitioners, and for a time some of the diocese,

sought to prevent the entire report from ever seeing the light of day. Documents were withheld. There was resistance. So what does that say about whether this is really old news? He said... In effect, they wanted to cover up the cover-up. There was an attempted cover-up of the cover-up. There was an attempted cover-up of the cover-up. And what he's referring to is that two of the diocese, Harrisburg and Greensburg, attempted to quash the grand jury process.

They said, why don't we just let local district attorneys handle this, knowing full well that the attorney general was going to bring more firepower to it, more attention, more investigative power. Then a number of people who were named in the report, about two dozen or 30 people or so, petitioned the court to prevent the report from being released. Priests. They were priests. They may also have been bishops. We know at least of one retired bishop who was among the petitioners. So what ended up happening was the court said, okay, we'll release the report and we'll redact some names. So when you look at this report, there's plenty of, you know, blackout on this report. Sometimes it's names, sometimes it's whole pages. However, if some of these people had had their way, the report wouldn't have been released at all. So while the actual abuse inside the church has been addressed in the 16 years since that first reporting in Boston,

it sounds like this attorney general is saying that the attitude of the church is still one of concealing. Yes, and I am not sure I agree with the premise of that question. What do you mean? I don't think all the abuse has been addressed in the church. You still hear of fresh cases.

Every year, there are still a few cases that are new. So it's not all cover-ups of old abuse. So I hope I didn't leave the impression that it's solved. But if most of the abuses did happen years ago, why has it been 16 years since the reporting in Boston? And this investigation in Pennsylvania is only now coming out in 2018. To do an investigation like this, it takes two things. It takes survivors willing to come forward.

And sometimes that can take years. One of the people who gave testimony about his abuse as a child before the grand jury was 80 years old. Wow. It is not uncommon for people in their 40s, 50s, 60s to finally decide to speak. So that's the first ingredient. But second of all, you need, in this case, an attorney general or a district attorney willing to take on the church and willing to put up with the resistance that they're going to get. And you've had that in Pennsylvania. So in Boston, it was the GLOBE that was willing to take this on. In this case, it sounds like it was the attorney general and their commitment to the story. It sounds like helped encourage people to come forward. Right. And I guess I just wonder, as someone who's covered this story for years, as you have, what are you thinking about this week with what's come to light in this Pennsylvania report?

Well, I think what hasn't really been grappled with adequately by the church or by law enforcement is the systemic nature of this. The case of Cardinal McCarrick in Washington, D.C. is one of the keys to that. Washington, D.C., is one of the keys to that. Here you have a cardinal who was accused of sexually abusing adult seminarians or his own younger priests. Supposedly, there were people in the church who knew that. Now, there are people who have studied the church who say that situations like that, which are more widespread than are known, bishops who are violating vows of celibacy, priests violating vows of celibacy with adults, with men, with women, and kind of a secret sexual culture. culture. When you have a culture like that, they say that if there is a priest who's abusing a child and it becomes known, that priest can use the knowledge of other people violating their vows of celibacy as blackmail. And this is why it never comes out. There is a culture of secrecy, a whole culture of cover-up in the church. So in other words, the problem is that because of the very nature of the church, including celibacy and hierarchy, that this becomes a self-reinforcing system where people can use the knowledge of others' abuse and leadership to protect themselves from repercussions.

That's exactly right. And I can hear you responding to this like it is a revelation. There are Catholics who study the church and study the sexuality of the priesthood who have been saying this for 20 and 30 years. Now, along comes this grand jury report, which is dropping in a climate where people are beginning to ask these questions about the church. How can we unravel these interlocking problems? And so that's the new stage that we are at and that this report now plays into and why it's not simply retread of things we already know. It's contributing to the larger picture that people are beginning to look at.

Is part of the discussion that this is prompting about whether or not the church needs to fundamentally re-evaluate the rules around sexuality in the church? It is. The fact that institutionally it's asked people to not be sexual. They've been pressing these questions for a while. The questions about how celibacy, priesthood of men who can't marry, who can't have physical relationships, how that plays into this sexual abuse scandal. The church has been turning away those questions, has said, those are not relevant. That's not what we need to look at. But the people calling for that to be examined, that's getting louder now than I've ever heard it before.

Lori, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Good afternoon. I'd like to begin by reading a statement from the president. As the head of the executive branch and commander in chief, I have a unique constitutional responsibility to protect the nation's classified information, including by controlling access to it. On Wednesday, President Trump revoked the security clearance

of former CIA Director John Brennan, who has emerged as a forceful critic of the president's policies and temperament. He is feeding and fueling hatred and animosity and misunderstandings among Americans. During a briefing at the White House, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made clear that it was Brennan's negative comments about Trump

that motivated the decision to take away his security clearance, which retired officials are allowed to keep so that they can advise their successors. Mr. Brennan's line and recent conduct, characterized by increasingly frenzied commentary, is wholly inconsistent with access to the nation's most closely held secrets and facilities, the very aim of our adversaries, which is to sow division and chaos. On Wednesday afternoon, Brennan responded to the

decision on MSNBC. I do believe that Mr. Trump decided to take this action, as he's done with others, to try to intimidate and suppress any criticism of him or his administration. And revoking my security clearances is his way of trying to get back at me. But this is not going to deter me at all. I'm going to continue to speak out. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.